Salmon Riffles
Somewhere off the coast of Alaska, 1000 miles from a shady little riffle in Finney Creek off the Skagit River in Washington State, a female chinook salmon pauses. She hangs fifty feet deep in the indigo-blue cathedral, yellow shafts of sunlight sparkling around her. She flips her powerful tail and swims in a large circle. Satisfied, she turns south…it is time to spawn. Two weeks later and 400 miles closer to the riffle as the raven flies, a male chinook stops in mid-ocean directly east of Cape Flattery. He rises and falls with the swell above and senses the rain and wind blowing the surface to smithereens. He, too, flips his tail and swims in a circle. Satisfied, he heads east.
A month later, these two magnificent creatures meet in the riffle under the maples on Finney Creek. She has been traveling for eight weeks, he six. They have swum thousands of miles, avoided orca whales, sea lions, and fishermen, breasted the flow of the mighty Skagit River, hid behind boulders, and ridden whirlpools to get here. They have a reddish tint to their bodies, sores, and lesions on their lips, heads, and sides. His upper jaw has grown long, crooked, filled with wicked teeth. Together, they are dying. She lays on her side, digs a hole a foot to 18 inches deep in the gravel, and lays her eggs. He hovers over them and releases a cloud of sperm - turns away. She wriggles on her side one last time upstream of the eggs to cover them with gravel, and she, too, turns away.
A thousand miles and weeks apart, these two salmon spirits turned in mid-ocean to meet here in the same riffle where they were born six years ago.
Hours after spawning, they are both dead.
Thirty years ago, there was this famous sea lion living in Puget Sound. He slept most days on a huge red navigation buoy outside the Crittenden Locks. He dined exclusively on salmon stacked up outside the locks as they negotiated the fish ladder from the Sound up to Lake Union. People thought it was horrible - while they watched fish climb the ladder, this massive sea lion would throw bloody, ragged fish in the air and play with them before gulping them down. They called him Herschel. People thought something should be done with this marauder lest he eat all the salmon, so Herschel was trapped and shipped off to the central California coast. Two weeks later, he was back on his buoy, gleefully eating more salmon.
Herschel is gone now, replaced by several hundred seals and sea lions crowding the breakwater at the marina outside the locks, all feasting on salmon.
One hundred years ago, it was thought fish hatcheries could produce enough fish to sustain a viable salmon population in any disrupted watershed. Millions of eggs were harvested and fertilized. Smolt were held in sterile concrete tanks and fed fish meal until they were big enough to be released back to the river and start their journey to the ocean. But, smolt raised in pens are more like cows than wiley salmon and are easy pickings for the predators - gulls, herons, osprey, seals, dolphins - waiting for them.
The more smolt were released from the hatcheries, the more the seal and sea lion populations exploded.
Hatchery fish are more susceptible to disease and can't survive extreme conditions. In some hatchery-fed runs, the more smolt that are released, the fewer adult fish return. Eventually, without the strength of wild genetics, the run will vanish.
Hundreds of years ago, First Nation fishermen used dip nets on Salish Sea rivers to scoop salmon out of the falls and rapids to feed their families. Salmon was smoked, jerked, used as a food source, and traded to tribes in the interior. Salmon was plentiful, and as long as the tribe treated the fish with respect as divine creatures, they would bless the tribe and return every year.
Now, government biologists set a minimum baseline for a sustainable population. They also forecast the number of returning fish. If the forecast is greater than the baseline, fishing is allowed. In this scheme, the tribes are allocated 50 percent of the excess. So if the baseline is 4,000 fish and the forecast is 5,000 returning fish, the tribes are allowed to harvest 500 fish. The other 500 fish are designated for sports fishermen. If the run doesn't match the forecast, fishing is suspended. Some tribes may only get to harvest four fish for a 10,000-member tribe. Their entire culture is at risk, and the enmity between First Nation and sports fishermen is poisonous.
Hundreds of years ago, a population of Orcas dined on hundred-pound chinook salmon off the San Juan and Vancouver Islands coasts. Each whale only needed to eat three or four of these giants to thrive. These whales - known as the Southern Residents - would gather in super pods of one hundred animals to hunt, socialize, and breed. Slow moving and cooperative, they ranged from the Klamath River in the south to the Haida Guaii Islands in the north but spent most of their time in the Salish Sea of Washington and British Columbia.
The surviving Southern Residents now feed on measly ten-pound chinook salmon, mostly off the coast of Oregon and Alaska. They rarely frequent the Salish Sea due to paltry salmon runs. Only 75 of these chronically hungry creatures remain.
Other orcas frequent the Salish Sea. Known as Transients, they dine on mammals - seals, sea lions, otters - travel in small compact pods, move quickly and aggressively, and roam from California to Alaska. Millions of released hatchery smolt feed thousands of seals and sea lions, which feed hundreds of Transient orcas.
Not so many years ago, Lake Michigan had an invasive fish problem. Alewife - a species of herring native to the Atlantic Basin - bypassed Niagra Falls via the Welland Canal and infiltrated the Great Lakes to the detriment of native fish. After spawning, Alewife died, and vast mats of dead fish washed up on Lake Michigan beaches to stink and be removed by bulldozers. Biologists in the Michigan Department of Natural Resources looked for an answer. They purchased a million chinook eggs from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and let the smolts loose in Lake Michigan. Salmon love herring, and a few short years later, the Alewife population was decimated, the beaches were clean, and a vibrant salmon sport fishery was established.
But it’s estimated that only 60 percent of the salmon in Lake Michigan are wild - that is, they reproduce outside hatcheries and are not stocked. The other 40 percent must be stocked every year. As other invasive species - such as Zebra Mussels - infiltrate the lake, Alewife and shrimp populations fluctuate, and with them, the salmon population. It takes a constant effort by Fish and Game biologists to monitor the populations and adjust the ratio of prey to predator to obtain the desired outcome. Around 10 million salmon now swim in Lake Michigan, in an engineered fishery dependent on human intervention. As the alewife goes, so goes the salmon.
Humans have scientifically managed salmon populations for the last 150 years. As a result, salmon thrive where they never existed before, yet are endangered in their ancestral watersheds. Seal and sea lion populations have soared. Southern resident killer whales starve. Transient killer whales are ascendant. For thousands of years, First Nation tribes celebrated the salmon’s return and harvested as many as they needed. Now, they hope enough fish return to be able to fish at all. Salmon ecology is topsy-turvy.
Our culture treats salmon as a commodity - a resource to be managed - rather than a miraculous artifact of this still-wild planet. Many salmon runs - genetically unique - are threatened and endangered. It’s not like we can't save them - we just won't. Why are they not treated the same as the American Bison, the Bald Eagle, the Osprey, Humpback Whales, grey wolves, and grizzly bears? Why are they not treated like Yellowstone, Yosemite, or Olympic National Parks? Why are they not a national treasure?
We can save the salmon. We know what to do, and they are brilliant at survival. Give them the slightest chance, and they will flourish.
But if we continue to treat them as a mere resource, a numbers game instead of the miraculous creatures they are - if we don't treat them as spirit animals - if we don't revere them as deeply as we revere God, politics, guns, and money - we will manage them to oblivion. The riffles will be still and empty, the whales will be dead, and we will deserve it.